With the rapid development of computer information technology, interactions between people and machines have extended from physical contact to voice control and have improved the convenience of the interactions.
Existing techniques in voice control use voice assistants installed on terminal devices, such as a vehicle-navigation system, a mobile phone, or a computer. In particular, users input voice commands through the voice assistants and the voice assistants execute related tasks according to the voice commands. This process is also referred to as voice control. The voice assistant usually needs the application related to the voice commands input by a user to execute those voice commands during the process of voice control.
In one exemplary use case, after a user launches a certain application (the first application) using the voice assistant, a user may launch another application (the second application) using the voice assistant. The second application will be running in the foreground and the first application, which was launched earlier, will be switched to the background. Moreover, in some situations, the user may still need to input additional voice commands using the voice assistant after the second application is launched and running in the foreground, to let the first application execute subsequent or advanced voice commands.
However, existing voice assistants can only control the foreground application to execute the voice commands for the foreground application, but cannot control a background application to execute advanced voice commands, which results in low voice controlling efficiency. For example, if a voice assistant receives a voice command input by a user requesting, “Play Dehua Liu's music” the voice assistant will run a music application in the foreground and instruct or otherwise cause the music application to execute the voice command to play a song of Dehua Liu's. If the voice assistant then receives a voice command input by the user asking, “Where am I?” the voice assistant would switch the music application from the foreground to the background and launch or run a map application in the foreground to ascertain the user's current location using the map application. When the voice assistant receives another voice command input from the user requesting, “Play another song of Dehua Liu's” the voice assistant determines that the current foreground application, the map application, is not relevant to the request “Play another song of Dehua Liu's.” The voice assistant will provide feedback to the user, for example, “Sorry, I don't know what you are saying” and/or fail to execute the voice command, “Play another song of Dehua Liu's,” which results in low voice controlling efficiency.
What is need is a method for voice control that is more efficient and addresses these deficiencies.